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Thursday, November 30, 2023 | 
U.S. & World Food

So apparently you can eat your Christmas tree

Julia Georgallis has a new book called “How to Eat Your Christmas Tree.”

By Herb Scribner Herb Scribnerhscribner@deseretnews.com
SHARE So apparently you can eat your Christmas tree
People walk past a Christmas tree.

People walk past a Christmas tree installed in front of the Historical Museum, center, in Manezhnaya Square near the Kremlin Wall, right, in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2020.

Pavel Golovkin, Associated Press

So apparently you can eat your Christmas tree if you have the right recipe for it.

What’s going on?

Julia Georgallis recently wrote a book titled “How to Eat Your Christmas Tree,” which shows readers how to reuse their real Christmas tree after the holiday ends.

Georgallis told Smithsonian magazine she created dozens of recipes with Christmas trees. The recipes are designed to spread a message about sustainability.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot and I don’t know why it’s so weird because we eat and we forage so many different plants. Christmas is a lovely time of year, but I think that everything, including the tree, is now viewed as a commodity. With the Christmas tree, we’re essentially putting houseplants in our house. But we don’t think of them as houseplants anymore. We had rituals based in nature and now we’re just very monetized.

Georgallis said that pine, fir and spruce trees can be used for certain meals. But cedar and cypress are poisonous, so it’s important to pick the right recipe.

Eating Christmas trees isn’t going to save the planet, but this book draws on the idea that you just need to start thinking about how you might want to reuse, recycle and re-appropriate everything and that includes your Christmas tree. It’s also about making sustainable changes.

Read more from the interview at Smithsonian magazine.

This isn’t exactly a new concept. In fact, The Boston Globe reports that there are some New England goats who will literally eat Christmas trees for you.

Social media reacts

Plenty of people on social media reacted to the story on Twitter, expressing surprise about all of the recipes.